Since FFXIV is trying to appeal to WOW players.Follow

..are the XIV players ready for what this actually entails?

I played Rift, Tera, SWTOR and a few other games that directly appealed to and attracted WOW palyers. As such I have some experience with them as a group, and not in a positive way. They are incredibly demanding and critical and will become very abusive if they don't think the new game lives upto their expectations from the amount of content etc that WOW offers.

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/06/07/e3-2012-the-plan-for-final-fantasy-xiv-on-playstation-3

Edited, Jun 22nd 2012 1:10pm by Runespider

@OP
So you assume there will be an onslaught of hundreds of thousands of WoW players that will not move to Gw2 but are desperate to give FFXIV yet another try? That, I doubt.

I think that FFXIV may, in time, attract many players from other games who are in search of something "different" in atmosphere. At least that`s what I hope for.

Edited, Jun 22nd 2012 7:44am by Rinsui

I believe the article is speaking about controls & interfaces. He is saying to expect the normal standard from which WoW has set. To expect the traditional tab target, hotbar, wasd layout, group finder, etc. Don't expect to see free targeting or something you haven't seen in an mmo before. Where as before Tanaka went the original route with the power gauge, active/passive mode, marketwards, battle regimens, sandboxy free company direction & DoL/DoH being more significant than a side hobby. Whether original or standard is better, that decision is up to the individual.

If Yoshi did mean more than controls & interfaces or difficult raids being borrowed from WoW. Then XIV is dead no matter what 2.0 looks like. I think WoW players are ready to leave WoW. It is just that every mmo either does something original subpar or copies WoW so much. They go try the game out & find that the more polished mmos are more of the same but with far less content & responsiveness.

If Yoshi's aim is to make the game somewhat profitable soon. Then standardization is the safest way to get the game back on it's feet. But any mmo that expects to approach WoWish success is going to have to do something original & polished while oozing out content. The direction Yoshi has taken seems realistic & in his companies best interest imo. Because there is no guarantee SE could attempt something original, polished, and loved. A second flop would probably get the game canned or made f2p indefinitely.

My main & only concern for XIV's future is an overuse of instances & long term goal progression. The world doesn't have to be seamless but Yoshi should aim to go open world at every avenue possible. The only time I feel instances are great is raids, mog houses or personal story. If he likes standard, open world is the new standard. If he wants to attract console users just look at what games have come out lately. RDR, GTA, skyrim, xenoblade, saints row, dragons dogma, the souls series, etc, etc.

Added this cause I wanted to comment on GW2. Guild Wars 2 is the mmo taking conventions or tropes associated with mmos & turning them upside down. Some will love this & some will hate it. The people who prefer hardcore treadmills & believe the real game don't begin till level cap are going to feel like going back to their bread and butter mmo. That's ok though. GW2 only needs you to purchase the box for them to be profitable. Imo I believe that GW2 is going to set the bar for what fun leveling should mean in an mmo. The verdict has yet to be seen. But if it sells more than GW1, many casual mmoers are going to begin questioning the subscription model more than they do now.

Edited, Jun 22nd 2012 11:48am by sandpark

Edited, Jun 22nd 2012 11:49am by sandpark

I think I picked up sarcasm? GW2 is doing cash shop the right way. They have a track record of cosmetic & optional purchases only aka fluff. Just because the usual cash shop is designed to be greedy & forced in other mmos, doesn't mean that is the only way. If this is true then the player is getting the best affordable point of entry to try out an mmo. Whether we agree or not, the majority of players don't want to fork out 100 bucks or more to try out a game over the course of three to six months.

Edited, Jun 22nd 2012 12:13pm by sandpark

Wow players bail on it at every new launch, they quickly go back to wow within the first month or two, happens every single time to every new MMO.

This wasn't a bash/glory post it was simply asking if the players are ready for a...lets say non FF group of players coming into their game and the change that will follow. Even if it's not that many it will still cause a rather large shock to the legacy players.

I wasn't trying to make a point about success or failure, just something I thought about when I read "Yoshida and team want those familiar with World of Warcraft to be able to transition into Final Fantasy XIV without a lot of hassle" and my experience with WoW players on other games.

I suppose the first reply answered it though.

Non-ff group?

"Their" game?

Good grief, just stop.

Speaking as a Legacy Player. No, I don't beleive FFXIV is 'My' game.

There are things I will most assuredly disagree with you on what we feel is best for the game.

But I take ownership of naught but my experiences in the game.

If anything I encourage a wide variety of people in this game and hopefully a game large enough to encompass it. Final Fantasy is about tales to be embraced and shared, even if we're just reciting tales of our own personal experiences with it.

XD you have very little to worry about on that front :p

At least not now FFXI is getting a new expansion anyway.



Edited, Jun 22nd 2012 2:31pm by Runespider

Ahh yes... more Voidwatch type events and zones with minimal reasons to actually go into them.

You're more than welcome to enjoy that. The past year of FFXI watching has shown that Tanaka and co. haven't learned a damned thing from their players.

Ever.

You are assuming FF players are like WoW players... many XI players burned the bridge to go back long ago (my self included). There is no going back for many that left XI. As well as a legacy member i do not feel XIV is my game, I stay with the game because of the people i know... Not because of some misplaced sense of ownership.

I find this type of post just "Dumb!" Because the notion of FFXIV was that it was not gonna be as hardcore and more casual friendly than FFXI! From the gate go the game was meant to target Casuals! The game failed to deliver on almost every point and it dint draw many casuals to it because of it's horrible release, but those that it did draw and stayed where run off by the "FFXI-Hardcore Crowd"

Oh you dont like the excellent idea of market wards ala 1650 ? Go back to wow!

Oh you dont like doing nothing but killing dodos ? Go back to wow!

You said What? That this game garbage ? It's people like you that cant appreciate a true MMO, GO BACK TO WOW!

Seriously tho, they need to draw people from wow, i am not saying 100%, but a 5% would be good, unless you think that the current player base is more than enough to sustain this game :/

And XI lasted a decade and going, also Swotor all along said that with 500k they could make their money up, FFXIV development was a joke compared to everyother MMO out there, so 500K on FFXIV should be profitable, tho i doubt they can reach those numbers.

This website wasn't up when you made your post. Anyway, does this mean that both FFXI and FFXIV are going to steal WoW players from each other now?

This seems easy to answer. There are 3 camps of mmorpg players.
1. The WoW/Rift type mmo audience
2. The EQ/XI type mmo audience
3. The want to see something different audience GW2/Tera

There is still an audience for the EQ/XI type. XI has become casual enough leveling wise for people who want to do endgame soon. It has almost a decade worth of content updates. XI arguably is one of the best mmos in terms of story. I think it has the best story of any FF prior. It just has long intervals between story segments. Right now, no game company seems to be thinking to create a new EQ/XI type mmo. So this audience is revisiting the original to try & rekindle an old flame.

While I'm not saying that it necessarily will, appealing to "WoW players" (depending upon how one perceives that group) can also entail other, less savoury modifications to the game. World of Warcraft is more than just menus and mouse control, after all... :x

Personally, I'd rather use the mouse less in FXIV. I'm keyboard exclusive in XI, and I get annoyed that the keyboard shortcuts in XIV are somewhat different and I haven't figured out all the differences yet.

Let's hope Matsui takes the hint and follows Yoshida's example.

I wish FFXI all the best, but so far there's still not enough to entice me over. I'm intrigued on how the new jobs will mesh, but ultimately the game is still built on dated and frustrating foundations that I don't see getting shaken up, unless SoA hits as hard as Abyssea did.

Aside from graphics... I unfortunately agree. Modern games feel snappy and streamlined. FFXIV 1.x... doesn;'t.

They are appealing to video game players....... by using and old and outdated model..... makes sense.

Ironic that they outsourced development of a lot of the game to China, isn't it?

Yeah, Tanaka never did learn that it isn't the RMT you need to focus on in that aspect but the players. There are still many problems I have with it, but WoW *did* accomplish the affect that RMT really don't have much of an affect at all in the game anymore. If FFXI/FFXIV had made gathering of mats quick and easy (as opposed to the clunky and slow mini-games you need to play) you shrink the potential market for RMT. RMT exist solely because aspects of the game are so stupidly slow/boring that the general populace really doesn't want to do them, and RMT know they can just create a botting program to perform the action and sell the goods. This is the single most important lesson from FFXI that the development team never learned; if you make the players jump through hoops to do something in a game for simple, mundane actions then you only end up helping the RMT to get another market.

And before people cry "account theft" that's on the player end, not Blizzard, Bioware, or Square-Enix. The majority of the time it's unsafe browsing (aka PORN/P2P) and their complete lack of any security features because "I haven't been hacked yet!" It happens in all MMOs.

I usually hate playing Devil's Advocate, but Rinsui's post was in regards to the leve puppets. Not the crafting or gathering puppets. In 14 there are far more puppets doing leves that there are botting.

As well, I, and quite a few people I know, enjoy the crafting and gathering aspects of the game (though I do admit, pushing all my crafts and gathering to 36 was a little mind-numbing after a while, and I had to take a break... but I said the same thing about getting all of my combat jobs to 50...)

Right now, the balance of costs of goods is still off, and if you look at most of the items in the Market wards that sell, you can see most are not botted (e.g. the Class weapons, Materia, common turn-ins for GC). You may ask, "How can you tell they are not botted?" Easily... Different people are always selling them. Every now and then someone will get a batch of sales, but the names of the sales are always changing.

But, yeah, the sock puppet parties are funny standing out at Cedarwood in their onion gear dinging 48 Thm...

Pretty much. WoW has a control scheme and interface that works better than any other modern MMO. Wanting a game to model that doesn't make it like that game in any other sense then the comfort of the user who is playing it. I'm not sure why people can't see that especially when it's plainly stated in the interview.

Your friend was just using a click mod. You keybind combinations of keyboard and mouse keys to trigger certain spells and/or abilities that only work with that specific part of the interface. It's not a matter of whether or not it's difficult(and I will try to steer away so I don't run over this horse for the thousandth time), it's comfortable and intuitive and it works... which is what a UI is supposed to be. In XI/XIV you don't have to keep track of nearly as much as you do in WoW.

Even if you never installed any of the mods, you still end up with a UI and control scheme that is light years ahead of XIV even though it's 7 years old.

Ah. I use the black background. Now I get what bothers you guys.
Better?